I always thought that companies have needs that are different from those of end users (see classification by target, B2C or B2B). And I think that this hypotheses is also true in internet area. These days I was busy with developing a TheWebMiner Filter and I want to talk in the following lines about internet search.

What is internet searching?

What I understand (and maybe many of you) by search is sorting. Google, Bing and other search engines try hard to find most relative page for our query and results are impressive. A colleague of mine told me that if you describe a movie scenario in a Google search, Google will find the Wikipedia page of movie. But this is an end user point of view.

Another interesting need is filtering. Many people from companies want also to filter internet websites in research purpose, exactly like products in a web store. The websites can be now classified by many criteria like purpose (commercial, blogs, organizations and many others), location, language, and these are just few criteria.

I think that filtering approach it’s not better or worse than search is just a complementary need.

Why companies want to filter Internet?

A very simple use case is market research. To find small competitors, to research a new market opportunity or just to find companies which provide a specific solution in a specific market. Another use case it to find very specific potential customers.

Solutions in this directions

Until here all the words above seem to be just only a hypotheses. But what is more valuable than a hypothesis? A validated hypothesis 🙂 . There are few companies trying to classify internet crawling link by link and put every website in a basket but for my disappointment and also opportunity these companies classify websites just for technology used.

Conclusion

I believe that  this is a real need of many companies and I have decided to give a chance to it. A prototype of our filtering engine is available here: TheWebMiner Filter